It’s been several weeks since I wrote about my father and his two arrests for driving under the influence. In the days since, the letters and calls have not stopped coming in, and I am reminded that many more families than we suspect have experienced alcoholism. That we grapple the way we do with how to punish people who repeatedly drink and drive is testament to that fact.

It is not inevitable that a drunk will choose to drive. What is inevitable is that all conversations about repeat offenders will return eventually to the underlying disease. This is a public issue in which many hold a personal stake. It is the mother who begins her letter to me with: “I love a drinker-and-driver — he is my son.” It is the woman who says she has lost track of her ex-husband’s DUIs.

“Thank God he has not killed anyone, but he has hurt many, primarily himself and those who care and love him. And he knows this.”

It is the woman who hands me my iced tea and then tells me she is going through something similar in her life. And the man who writes only two sentences. The first is thank you. The second is, “I have a similar problem.” Is he the drinker who drives or the family member watching alcoholism destroy someone he loves? I cannot bring myself to ask.

A man whose first wife died an alcoholic at 48 pointed out rightly that in my list of tactics family members of alcoholics engage in — we plead, we get angry, we blame ourselves — I should have added, “We enable.” I remember then how I once refused to keep alcohol in the house when my dad came for an extended visit and how he, in withdrawal, became so irritable, I put a six-pack in the fridge just to buy some peace.

One e-mail arrives with a postscript. It says,”A few hours ago this morning, an old friend of mine, P.J., called to tell me his youngest brother passed away due to his alcoholism.”

As it happened, I was to meet P.J. that very day. He is well-known in this town, an educator and activist, among many other things. Would he talk to me about his brother, I asked the man who sent the e-mail. Yes, the answer comes back.

Pierre Jimenez meets me the day after his brother’s funeral. He drinks iced tea and tells me about Gilbert. He was 55. He had two young children. “The cycle of addiction devastates families from the inside out,” Jimenez starts the conversation.

He is angry. As is often the case when alcoholism is the disease, it is not clear with whom he is angry. Gilbert, yes. But it is also the anger of helplessness. It is the anger of families who disagree on how sick a loved one is. Or how to help a man who is arrested for drunken driving, for drugs, who ends up in the hospital, in detox and finally, on the floor, brain hemorrhaging, in the basement hallway of his mother’s house.

He says his brother’s girlfriend found a miniature, still unopened, in the oatmeal box.

Their love was vast and it was easy, Jimenez tells me, to see what one wanted, to believe with time and patience and compassion, a disease could be healed. Jimenez loved his brother, too. But he did not share this optimism. He told his brother to go to in-patient treatment. Gilbert refused. In the three weeks before Gilbert’s death, the brothers stopped speaking to each other. “When other people have this problem, I’m a lot more sympathetic,” Jimenez tells me. “But when it comes to my family, it’s looking at it and saying: ‘I can’t condone this. I can’t accept it. Something needs to be done.’

“My brother was in the hospital six times last year. He’s been arrested for DUI. When someone drinks and then drives, that’s a conscious decision and they’re accountable for that decision. . . . But locking everybody up is not the answer. That’s not the answer for this disease because no matter how long you are away from it, you are never free from it.”

Jimenez says he hopes someone, an alcoholic or the family of an alcoholic, will read this and decide to seek treatment “because the next Gilbert is waiting.

“No one wants to put their business out on the street. But we’re not talking about infidelity. We’re talking about a life-threatening disease that is progressive and irreversible without treatment. There are no happy endings here.”

He finishes his tea and we say our goodbyes, and later I think how so many of the conversations, the letters, the phone calls carry the tones of confession. Of something shameful admitted. Voices laced with anger and remorse and love and helplessness, a shared lament.